Tuesday, December 18, 2007

I saw "I Am Legend" today. Besides featuring Will Smith's best performance to date, it's a visual triumph: its depiction of an apocalyptic Manhattan is the most attentive and arresting of any film I can think of (with the possible exception of Terry Gilliam's "12 Monkeys"). Real effort was spent transforming New York into a weather-beaten carcass, and the result yields moments of genuine visual poetry. Factor in Smith's convincing alienation and the first half of the film is wrenchingly good.

But there are problems. For one, the CGI zombies are too obviously CGI. Computer-generated FX work best when cooking up insects and reptiles, as in "The Mist"; the scrambling cadavers that feast on screen-time in "I Am Legend" move with a biomechanical complexity that betrays their unreality and aggravates the viewer's suspension of disbelief.

But the defining problem with "I Am Legend" is the ending, which insults the intelligence of the rest of the film (and that of its audience) with a whorish appeal to superstition and the oh-so-flawed cinematic wisdom that Love Conquers All. Like "Children on Men," "I Am Legend" succumbs to one of the deadliest science fiction foes of all: undeserved optimism.

6 comments:

I totally agree with your assessment of the film here. It starts off well, but the CGI zombie things really ruined the flick for me. They're so rubbery and un-menacing they took me out of the story before it could really begin. *Sigh* At least there's always the book!

However I disagree about the ending of "I Am Legend" being like the ending of "Children of Men". The latter film is primarily about hope, or the glimmer of hope, while "I Am Legend" is fundamentally about despair and isolation, which is why the ending of "Legend" rings so hollow and false. I think "Children of Men" had an appropriate ending, with the almost dreamlike arrival of the mist-covered ship symbolic of the (very cautious) optimism that the film embodies.

Okay, this is the second review talking about zombies in I Am Legend. WHAT THE HELL! Richard Matheson's story is about vampires! As far as I know every other film version of this book including Charleton Heston's The Omega Man uses vampires. Just because 28 Days made so much money, you need to change a core facet of the book, that humanity has been turned into blood drinkers?

Yeah, I guess I can put that on my view on DVD much later list because I am too pissed to enjoy it a theater now.

"Frankly, there's nothing worse (aside from death, global famine, nuclear disaster and all-round armageddon) than seeing players in the UFO field fawning all over their peers at conferences as they seek acceptance into the ufological sand-pit by saying the 'right thing' to the 'right people.' Thankfully, there's none of that in Mac's world."